Flyers GM won’t make deadline deals for playoff push

The Philadelphia Flyers sit at 58 points in the Eastern Conference in 56 games, which is a not-all-that-unreasonable distance from the Boston Bruins (55 games, 63 points) for the last wild card.

So here we go, right? The big deal that gets the Flyers into the postseason? The Ed Snider-approved trade that shakes up the East?

Yeah … not so much.

"We're not gonna make a deal to try to put us in the playoffs," GM Ron Hextall told the Courier Post. "I believe we can make the playoffs with this team right now and quite frankly, to add a piece right now that's gonna help us that's gonna be better than what we have is gonna be very costly. We're not going there."

So it’s not so much that he doesn’t think that the Flyers can’t make the postseason, it’s that the deadline prices are too high and Philadelphia has a decent collection of young assets with whom they don’t want to part for a temporary fix.

This frugality has been a hallmark even under Paul Holmgren; how many times has Sean Couturier been “traded” in the last three years?

"Look at the history of the deadline: it's a pricy time," Hextall told Dave Isaacs. "To get something better than what we have, we're giving a lot up. That's not gonna happen. We know where we're headed and we're still headed there. I'm not deferring of course of where we set out last summer."

Does that mean the Flyers won’t deal away any of their veteran cap bloat?